Bollywood Cooking: An Assortment of Burfi with Mowie and Me

There’s a special treat in store for you all today. For this session of Bollywood Cooking I have some great support. Today Mowie and me are doing a double feature of a classic Indian sweet with a spectacular German twist. While Mowie shares his pretty Pink Almond Spekulatius Barfi here, I am over at Mowie’s presenting my Chocolate Lebkuchen Fudge Burfi.

Mowie steal the show!

Welcome Everyone!

My name is Mowie and I'll be your dessert technician this week. I've taken over Meeta's blog and will be whipping up a fabulous sticky and sweet concoction where India meets Germany in a delectable delight for your culinary senses. Meeta is doing the same over at my blog Mowielicious.com, so do hop on over there when you've finished reading this to see her *amazing* creation.

I'd been reading Meeta's blog for a while and loving it up until we 'met' online. She'd accepted an invitation to give a talk about food photography & styling at our Food Bloggers Connect happening next week in London. We'd been emailing, getting to know one another, and from then on it was just inevitable that we would guest post for each other, and I have to say, when I found out it was for a Bollywood cooking series, I didn't have to think twice about what I wanted to try out as I'd been meaning to make it for ages: Burfi!

Before I go on, I have to say a big thank you to my friend Fariya for her tips, tricks and recipes - I couldn't have done it without you!

I'd never made burfi before and the first thing that came to mind was thinking up extravagant and spectacular ways of presenting it in my photos. I had the perfect image in mind, but I learned the hard way to not think too far ahead when trying out a new recipe for the first time. The first attempt turned out really delicious, but too sticky, not allowing me to mould it into what I wanted. The second attempt yielded something slightly more on the liquid side of caramel, at which point I may have started panicking *just* slightly. However, at my third attempt, everything turned out better, and much easier & quicker than I could have imagined - phew! By this time I'd changed my mind about how I wanted to serve it. I did toy with the idea of serving the burfi traditionally, but I decided to plate it in dessert dishes instead. The original way of serving burfi is akin to brownies: big, chunky squares of nutty goodness (to see what they traditionally look like and for a bit of burfi history, take a look at Meeta's burfi on my blog HERE).

Being this close to Christmas, I'd been craving spekulatius biscuits almost daily. Those of you familiar with my blog know that I love combining two or more recipes, like my Belgian Speculoos Tiramisu Verrines (speculoos is the Belgian name for spekulatius). I had a recipe for some spekulatius cookies I'd been meaning to try out for a while now (and I will be doing those shortly on my blog) but to add a twist, I thought I'd go ahead and add some of the main spekulatius spices to the burfi, and together with the almonds, it turned out to be the perfect combination.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I present you with my interpretation of burfi, where India meets Germany, sticky & sweet, sugar & spice and all nutty things nice. So simple, so quick, and so utterly delicious. Enjoy!

Pink Almond Spekulatius Barfi

Ingredients

200ml sweetened condensed milk (you can make this yourself by boiling down 400ml of milk with 150g sugar for 30 minutes, stirring constantly, or you could just buy the ready made version)
100g butter
450g finely chopped almonds (you can also use pistachios or a combination of the two)
1tsp ground ginger
1tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp ground cardamom
[optional] 2tsps natural pink food colouring (for this recipe I used organic beetroot juice)

Method

Heat condensed milk in a large, deep pot on a medium to high heat, stirring constantly to make sure it doesn't burn.

Add the butter, colouring and spices, and keep stirring.

Add the almonds and stir until the mixture forms a ball in the pan. If the mixture is still too liquid or sticky, add more almonds.

Plate the mixture into dessert dishes.

Refrigerate and serve cold with sprinkled almonds or pistachios. The colder the burfi, the better it tastes!

Note: If using pistachios, you might want to consider leaving out the food colouring as the nuts will naturally turn the burfi green.

Thank you Mowie for sharing this moment of Bollywood Cooking with me. To all of you I hope you will have a grand time with both, slightly different but very fun recipes for burfi.

Wishing you all a grand weekend! See you next week as I share a delectable dessert and many Thanksgiving menu ideas.

Happy Weekend and lots of

Hugs!

All photographs and written content for this post courtesy of Mowie @Mowielicious. Published with permission.

Wow Mowie, you've done it again: gorgeous photos, gorgeous presentation! These look so fabulous I would be afraid to eat them but then again, they sound too scrumptious not to! Brilliant collaboration.

Mowie, you're superb! How beautiful does that look? I am a great fan of burfi and yours os such a beautiful interpretation of this all time favourite. Thanks for making it Can't wait to meet you at the FBC asnd tell you in person , what a great job you do :-)

A man after my heart...sweet heavens Mowie. WOW!! How amazing can you get! Love your food styling & the way you brought this together. Condensed milk in dessert is really the way it should be. Yes, Jamie's right. I would be too scared to eat this beauty! Can see white flowers here...lovely!

I've never had burfi (nor have I heard of it), but this looks amazing. I love the pink, and it's even better that you can use beetroots in place of food colouring. And again, the wonderful flowers, it's quickly becoming your (Mowie's) trademark! :P

Wow, thanks everyone for all your lovely comments and for making me feel so welcome here. Thanks Meeta for hosting me, I could get really comfy here at yours. It was a blast working with you, we should do it again sometime xxx

Wow Mowie! Your photo's are stunning - am a HUGE fan of yours and love your blog! I never would've thought of doing burfi like that - didn't know it was so easy to make! I must try it and yes, ok - the pink color looks amazing! x samera x :)

These twin posts (on this blog and the other) are spectacular: innovative twists on a traditional favorite recipe, and lovely presentation. It's so surprising that in this globalized day and age so many people haven't heard of burfi (but the same people would be surprised if people in India had not heard of some obscure European cake variety) and so many of them are going to go away thinking that burfis are served in a dessert dish and eaten with a spoon! :)

Oh, how lovely the German style burfis look. I just wanna grab hold of one immediately :).@Meeta: Will your talk at the Food Blogger's Connect be on youtube or anywhere online, I'll not be able to attend, but I am very very interested to hear you.

Thank you all from Mowie and me for all your lovely comments on this collaboration.

ANON: I doubt that many will go away thinking that burfi is served in dessert plates. In both our posts we made it very clear that a)we were having fun with a traditional sweet that looks and is served differently b) in my post over at Mowie's explained what burfi is.

Hi meeta...i just started reading you blog yest.could i replaces the nuts with anything else?as mowie said almonds will make the thing less liquidy and less sticky?cos some people r allergic so what r the other options?

Thank you for visiting What's For Lunch, Honey? and taking time to browse through my recipes, listen to my ramblings and enjoy my photographs. I appreciate all your comments, feedback and input. I will answer your questions to my best knowledge and respond to your comments as soon as possible.

In the meantime I hope you enjoy your stay here and that I was able to make this an experience for your senses.

Hello, I am Meeta a freelance food photographer, stylist and writer living in the cuturally rich city of Weimar, Germany with my husband and our son, where I enjoy preparing multi-cultural home cooked meals with fresh organic ingredients. What's for lunch, Honey? is my award winning food blog where I combine my love for food with my love for photography and styling...